Only a couple of centuries ago, a person born blind or becoming blind during their lifetime suffered a major disability with little hope for becoming a productive person. There existed no means or technology to allow a blind person to read on their own, and thus such persons relied mainly on hearing, speech and touch for interacting with the surrounding world. During the post Napoleonic Wars, a system was created by Louis Braille to allow a person to read a secret code by their finger tips for the purpose of receiving information for spacial coordinates for aiming and shooting artillery at night to avoid the use of light for visual reading of such information. Prior visual reading with light proved to be a significant problem, since the enemy could easily aim and fire at the lit target. Eventually, this code became used by the blind and was named after the inventor Braille.
Since the time when Louis Braille introduced his modified military tactile code as a communication means for the blind in 1829, very little has been done to provide an alternative “language” for the low vision or blind (LV/B) persons. In the times of Helen Keller, there were approximately 250,000 Braille-literate people in the United States. Today, there are only approximately 225,000 Braille-literate people in the United States. Of children (K thru 12) in the United States, only approximately 5,500 can read Braille. There is, however, no new language for the LV/B individuals to free them from either Braille, or other expensive sophisticated devices that may or may not make their lives easier. Most of these devices, which use Braille as their language are both cumbersome and expensive.
Braille is a pattern of raised dots or bumps in a particular pattern to symbolize an alphanumeric letter, thus a different pattern exists for each letter of the alphabet. A person reading the code places his or her finger tip of the index finger of their reading hand over the Braille, and begins to read left to right, top to bottom. Braille is a relatively difficult system to learn and use, since it is extremely difficult for a person to acquire the sensitivity or ability to accurately feel the raised dots or bumps to an extent to be able to interpret and understand each particular letter.
Today, being blind is still a significant disability substantially inhibiting employment, daily activities, and hampering personal and professional productivity. This significant disability renders most of such blind persons unable to function successfully in today's advance computer based work environments, and thus most are unemployable, even in service industries, even though most blind person desire to work and live like the rest of the population.
There exists a substantial need to devise a new device, system and method to allow most blind persons to read printed matter at a level to allow such blind persons to work and compete successfully in a job environment. Recently, Congress has enacted the Instructional Materials Accessibility Act requiring all publishers of printed matters in the United States to devise such a device, system, or method to allow blind persons to obtain the same information contained in published printed matter. The present invention provides such means to allow dissemination of printed matter or published information to the blind.